Volvo Trucks hopes to take preventative maintenance to a new level with several technologies designed to monitor the health of truck components and even predict when a failure might occur. The company recently launched a tyre management service for customers in Sweden, started a pilot program for truck monitoring in Europe, and plans to implement machine learning to make its analytics programs even more accurate.
“New technologies for monitoring and analysing truck data in real-time are opening up exciting opportunities to predict failures more precisely and further into the future,” says Markus Efraimsson, vice president for Uptime at Volvo Trucks. “It's all part of our continuous effort to keep our customers' trucks on the road. We're looking at uptime from a customer perspective, so our focus is really to secure that the customer has no unplanned stops.”
Tyre Management
Volvo’s tyre management service is designed to keep track of tyre pressure and temperature while the truck is in use. Drivers and fleet managers can use an application to watch for damage to tyres that could eventually lead to a blowout. The service, which will expand into other markets throughout Europe, also offers contributes to greater fuel efficiency and extended tyre life by maintaining proper temperature and pressure at all times.
Pilot Program Already Underway
Some customers in Europe with Volvo Gold service contracts are already taking advantage of the company’s truck monitoring solutions as part of a pilot project. The company has been monitoring thousands of trucks and has already had success in preventing breakdowns. The larger goal of the program is to spot issues before they cause downtime, send a notification to Volvo’s Truck Monitoring Centre, and then relay that message to a repair shop near the customer to address the problem.
Machine Learning
Over time, Volvo wants to incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence into its truck monitoring system. It will then be able to analyse data from trucks and use gathered insights to spot potential problems more accurately in the future. Volvo hopes that improving the efficiency of this process will make it so that preventative repairs can be made during regular, planned service.
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